I want to make a general impartial survey of the state of popular art now, and where the best of it can be found.
Why is this important?
Because finding art of any upper-calibre is a life-affirming and civilising act, and moreover often a highly educational one
Because there are vast and important secrets kept (though often not very well) within the popular art that a population decides to consume. National psychologies, spending habits, general dispositions to life; all of them lurk, disguised and heavily qualified, in aesthetic preferences. You can tell roughly what a viewership’s commonly accepted prejudices are relative to different kinds of personalities based on what they watch and listen to. You can tell what epistemological traps people are liable to fall into by tracing out the general patterns of dramatic tension and moral resolution in a popular TV show (it needn’t be a well-made one, and may indeed be more useful in these capacities if it’s not).
In our day and age, which has elevated relativism to a matter of sophisticated metropolitan etiquette, and where the common constitution is given the two-bob-bits by any proclamation on any subject of wide affect or large import that is not pedantic, marginal, and data-backed, looking for answers (or clues to the answers) of serious questions in things like conventions of popular art is considered a most unseemly practice, elitist if not futile. Indeed, the very methodology in question is bound to lead us to any number of horribly erroneous prospective conclusions.
But it will also condition the analytical instinct for loosely affirmed concepts about individual and collective behaviour and belief that escape data’s power of capture. Such things as can be empirically observed but cannot be empirically qualified are to be held in considerable scepticism; but only a fool ignores them.
At any rate, we are not going to attempt much analysis via the best popular art as we can find in this exercise — for now, we’re just going to try to find the best as can be found.
In the course of discussing the works I mean to discuss, I will endeavour to avoid spoilers wherever I can. I will not succeed in this effort, because in some cases it is impossible to discuss what is great in a work without discussing crucial components of its plot and so on. Even where spoilers are present, they will not be abundant, and will be disguised as best they can be. Beyond providing crucial context as might help make it understood what is worthwhile about these works, my aim here, like all writers of fond criticism, is to get you excited enough about these things to chance your own encounters with them. That will involve concealing almost as much as I intend to reveal.
A Working Definition of Popular Art
‘Popular art’ is itself a difficult term.
The notion of a division between ‘high art’ and ‘popular art’ is highly contingent. Much art which is now accorded access to the canon, in various genres from woodcuts to drama to painting, was considered the popular art of its day, and in many cases was only permitted to exist for the very reason that it proved popular. History has sometimes entertained a notional separation between art made to mint a penny, and art made to serve some more fundamental aim and intention of the artist. In the West, this separation has been strongest in two discrete periods - a mostly pre-market period, where art was primarily decorative or monumental, intended for the glory of institutional commissioners or aristocratic connoisseurs; and an industrial period, where the market for art grew to such a size that distinction became necessary to try and protect aesthetic standards from the tyranny of the median taste profile [1].
For every Johann Sebastian Bach, shrinking universal laws into entwined musical threads for the pleasure of provincial German courts and Leipzig coffee houses, there is a Jan Vermeer or Hercules Seghers, prostrating themselves upon the alter of their muse, bankrupting themselves to the intransigent voice of genius, and acting like fine Protestants in reserving all their success to their afterlife. Bach, though his work sat proudly outside the collective historical process, was from a family of jobbing musicians and his largest body of work is a cycle of cantatas intended for common-or-garden congregational singing. His work was not especially popular in its day, but was not made with indifference to its reception. Vermeer and Seghers’ work, on the other hand, was made primarily as an expression of each artist’s aims and habitudes, and their outlaw philosophy did not even start becoming patent until the 19th century, where the gulf between the popular and the serious grew in part owing to the spreading wide of Romantic attitudes, and in part owing to the blooming of industrial economies and the means thereby to support a much larger art industry. People who can enjoy art, who are free to enjoy fine discrimination, and who can entertain distinctions between art that is great and art which is merely art, must necessarily have at least relative financial comfort. This, to my mind, is one of the great arguments in favour of markets, alongside their tendency to inculcate partial fealty to international law wherever they spread.
For our present purposes, we will define ‘popular art’ as artwork that, insofar as it is conceived, is largely created for the purposes of providing popular entertainment. They operate in popular forms that millions of people have common access to, and are generally created in the hope of appealing to as large a share of that market as possible.
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